A review of Android for Work: Dual-persona support comes to Android

Google aims for the enterprise with separate work and home data on a single device.

If you work in an office environment, you probably know a few people—maybe a lot of people—with two smartphones. One is a personal phone full of pictures of the family, games, social networking, and sports stuff, and the other is a company-issued smartphone full of e-mail, appointments, contacts, and documents. With two phones, your IT department has full control over your work data and can remotely wipe it, and they never get to see your personal pictures or other information. It's a workable setup, but the downside is all the duplication—you have two phones, two chargers, and almost no free pocket space. The other alternative is BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—in which the IT department takes over and installs a bunch of company software to your personal phone.

There is a better way, though, and it's called a "dual-persona smartphone"—a way to have separate work and personal data on a single device. Blackberry was the first to have it baked into the OS in BB10, but in terms of OSes that users actually want to use, it's been left up to often-clunky third-party solutions.

With Android 5.0, Google laid the groundwork for dual-persona support right in the OS with "managed profile" APIs, and now there's a more complete solution from the company called "Android for Work."

Work and personal apps, all in a unified interface

I'm seeing double! No wait, it's just personal Gmail and work Gmail.

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There are multiple ways to do a dual-persona smartphone. Android supports multiple users, so one clunky way to get separate work and personal data would be to just make two users: "Personal user" and "Work user." You'd have separate apps, data, icon layouts, wallpapers, media—basically separate everything. You'd have to log in and out of accounts all the time to view notifications and use apps, though. No one really wants that much separation.

Blackberry 10's dual-persona mode—called "BlackBerry Balance"—used a "spaces" interface, which was kind of like a virtual desktop for phones. You could bring up a menu and press either the "work" or "personal" button, and you would then be whisked away to a separate desktop with a new wallpaper and apps. When you were in one space, you wouldn't see notifications from the other space. This seemed like basically the two-user approach, but instead of having to log in and out, you could just switch users.

Work apps and personal apps, living together! Administrators can add whatever they want to the work profile, even if they want to have a company-wide Angry Birds tournament.

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Work apps in the app drawer. Note that this is page three of the app list—Work apps are sorted last.

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Personal and Work notifications show up on a unified panel, but they are split up, just like the apps. Work notifications get a little red badge on the right.

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The little red badges show up on the Overview icons, too. The Work Play Store even has a different color scheme.

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The share dialog gets a profile switcher in the top right that will change between personal and work apps.

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Work and personal apps are identical, other than the data.

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The work profile is just another account, so it shows up in the sync list just like everything else.

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Android for Work does things a little differently. While it uses Android's multi-user framework to securely separate work and personal profiles, there is no switching users. Everything lives on a single, unified interface. Through Google Apps and the Google Apps Device Policy app, it takes a personal device and adds an additional work profile that your company owns.

You can have two copies of apps on the single home screen—one personal and one for work, with the work apps denoted by a little red badge. Other than the badges, the apps are identical to personal apps most are already familiar with. Gmail still looks just like Gmail; now it simply has a company-owned user account on it.

You can, of course, arrange the Android home screen icons anyway you want. However, Work apps show up last in the app drawer (after all your personal stuff). We've never once wanted sorting options in the app drawer other than "alphabetical," but now we're thinking some people will dislike the "work apps are last" sorting.

Notifications for each account come in and stack in your notification panel just like anything else. Like apps, work notifications are separate from personal ones, again marked with that little red briefcase badge. Overview separates everything too, allowing users to quickly jump between work and personal Gmail if they want.

Android for Work even adds a profile switcher to the share dialog so users can pick which account they want the shared item to go to.

The project is built on technology from a May 2014 acquisition of a company called "Divide," which made one of the best dual-persona enterprise apps for Android and iOS. There are, of course, limits to what an app can do, so Google brought the feature down to the OS level, allowing for a better integration with Android and the Play Store. Android for Work was announced at Google I/O 2014, where Google also said Samsung would be contributing code from Knox, its enterprise mobility solution, to the project. Apparently something happened between now and then because no Samsung-contributed code was used in Android for Work.

Android still doesn't have a ton of ways to lock a device down, which will stop high-security organizations from switching to Android for Work. Google Apps Device Policy is used to lock down the OS, but the list of available policies is pretty limited—it's mostly password requirements, forcing device encryption, and disabling the camera. There's nothing to stop someone from copying text from the work profile and pasting it into their personal Gmail, for instance. So for now, Google is aiming at companies that don't need ultra-high security.

Correction: There actually is a checkbox to lock down copy/paste across profiles! You can disable the "share" functionality, too.

Setup is a Byzantine nightmare

Further Reading

Since Android 5.0 came out four months ago, you may be wondering why we're only now looking at this feature. It's not just the OS that needs to support Android for Work; you need a compatible Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution. There are a number of compatible partners, but for our case, we're going all-Google and using Google Apps for Work—the business-focused version of Google's Web apps that works with a custom domain. Making Google Apps (or some other EMM provider) a requirement means that you'll have to pay a monthly fee ($5 per user for Google Apps) to use Android for Work.

Getting to the point where Android for work was actually usable was a long process. Google announced that Android was "ready for work" on February 25, it announced the required Google Apps compatibility a week later, and everything actually started working about another week after that.

To get setup, we'll first need to dive into one of the most complicated, confusing, unintuitive interfaces Google has ever birthed: The Google Apps Dashboard. While a lot of the documentation falls back on the old cop-out of "contact your administrator," Google Apps is marketed toward small businesses. Theoretically, a normal person should be able to do this—I am the administrator in this test setup.

Welcome to the Google Apps dashboard, which I now see every time I close my eyes. Before we get started, try to guess which section we'll need first to enable Android for Work. "Device management?" Nope. "Security?" Wrong. "Apps?" Bzzzt.

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The correct answer is to first hit this little link: "Get more apps and services."

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Then at the bottom of the page is an "Android for Work" listing.

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Agree to everything and hit continue.

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Now what? Any guesses? There's no "Android for Work" icon or anything. Next we go to Security.

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Nothing obvious here, but hit "Show More."

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Here we go! Android for Work settings! That's progress.

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Try to wrap your head around this one. We're in Google Apps, which is an EMM provider, but it's telling us we need an EMM provider. Anyway, click the "Generate Token" button...

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...and you'll get a code. Now we need to paste the code into another part of the Google Apps dashboard. It's crazy that we have to get one part of Google Apps to talk to another part via copy and paste, rather than there just being a "go" button and Google handling everything.

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Back to the dashboard! Now we click on (place your bets).... Device Management!

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Specifically the "Mobile" section of Device management. At the bottom will be another "Android for Work" section, where you can paste your token code. (This screenshot was after I entered the code. The text box disappears.)

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Next, go to the Device Management settings (at the top of the last page) and require your users to make a Work profile. CONGRATULATIONS! You have survived the Android for Work setup. At least, you're finished with the dashboard part. Now grab a phone!

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You'll need to install the "Google Apps Device Policy" app and sign in with your Google Apps account. It will prompt you to create a Work profile.

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After the profile is created and everything syncs up, you'll get a few new items in your app drawer with a special red badge. These are the apps for your work account.

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The gallery above shows off the setup process. Basically, after adding Android for Work as a "service" to Google Apps, it takes a bunch of Android for Work settings and scatters them across the various dashboard sections. Then it's up to the user to go on a scavenger hunt and discover all the newly added Android for Work setup sections that have been hidden in various nooks and crannies in the dashboard. If you haven't guessed from the size of the gallery, setup is a really awful experience.

Android for Work desperately needs either its own page full of all the settings or a setup wizard. Right now you have to visit three different sections and copy/paste a security code from one section of Google Apps to another just to set up Android for Work. Throughout it all, there is never any on-screen guidance about what you should be doing next. Over and over again, I was left asking "What do I do now?" when trying get through the setup.

To be fair, in a large business this process would be taken care of by IT and, at most, only the sign in steps would be up to the user. Does all "enterprise" software come with some kind of requirement that it be needlessly complicated, though?

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo